Bash stdout character limit

Question

How can you limit the count of standard output characters that is redirected to file?

Answer 1

Other ways (external)

echo $out| head -c 20
echo $out | awk '{print substr($0,1,20) }'
echo $out | ruby -e 'print $_[0,19]'
echo $out | sed -r 's/(^.{20})(.*)/\1/'